100 Books 38 - Robert Anton Wilson's THE COSMIC TRIGGER

I can't do a year of books without including a little something by my old pal Robert Anton Wilson. I can, of course, only sort of call him a pal, since I met him once, alas, prematurely for me; I was 18, more or less fresh out of high school and small town Wyoming, drawn to a talk he gave at Saugerties, NY's Thelemic Arts Center on "Religion for the Hell of It." I had just had his The Illuminatus! Trilogy slammed down in front of me, a weird gauntlet in weirder prose, by a college buddy who became a lifelong friend and who went tot he talk with me. Skeptics both, we read that trilogy mostly for yuks, of which there are plenty to be had there. We sought and found similar yuks in Wilson's talk, at which he made us all Discordian popes. This was, of course, the highlight for us, being 18 and bumptious and skeptical. That and hearing all of the batshit theories spun out in the form of highly tangential questions from the audience after Wilson concluded his talk with a resounding "We're all bozos on this bus!"

My appreciation for Wilson and what he had to share has only grown over the years. While I'm still fairly skeptical of many of the ideas he laid out before us over his lifetime of writing, thinking and biochemical auto-experimentation, so was he in a lot of ways, but his skepticism was much more gracious and forgiving and open-minded than mine had been that night when I went to hear him talk about Discordianism and the Church of the Sub-Genius and other delights. And some of it wasn't skepticism at all, I later discovered.

The Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, to give it its proper title at least once in this post, was already a classic when I went to hear him speak. Dating back to the early 1970s, it had a weird, nostalgic luster even then, for the Reagan years had just happened and we were poised to start the first Bush years when he spoke -- his vulgarisms about the names on the Republican ticket drew big, bitter laughs from a crowd who had mostly suffered through the 80s with a near-despair that only the 'oughties under Bush's son could eclipse. Now, as we approach 2012, a year in which only seriously die-hard skeptics of the Dawkins/Randi/Hitchens/Plait school believe nothing special is going to happen*, there is a lot of speculation that comes across as positively quaint. Wilson, for instance, was pretty sure that the L5 Society would have achieved its goal of establishing a permanent city in outer space by 1990, for example. Ah, me.

What I enjoyed most about this particular, largely autobiographical, work of Wilson's is the frank way he refers to himself as a vast cast of characters. I'm a big fan of Jung and his disciple James Hillman,** and of the multiplicity of selves/archetypes both have seen and teased out for our examination in every human mind. So when Wilson writes from The Skeptic or The Shaman or (very movingly) The Parent, so frankly treating each aspect of himself as an entity in its own right, he makes me smile even more than he did back in the day when he was cracking jokes about the country's Bush. Again, I come to these notions of his historically backwards; he wrote this book in the 1970s when I was just a toddler; I encountered the notion of each one of us as a collective psyche in books that came both before and after it between my hearing him in 1988 and my reading this book in 2011. I am unstuck in time and I love it, and feel very Wilsonian in my love.

Most of all, I like Wilson's approach to occultism and theories thereof. He may speak persuasively about the reality of this idea or that, but he never states outright that he believes in it or thinks that his reader should. He entertains ideas in that most basic etymological sense at the root of the word entertain: he tosses ideas gracefully back and forth, the Skeptic catching and examining one and passing it back to the Shaman, who passes it back, possibly changed, possibly not. And never once does he get dogmatic. He doesn't care if anyone agrees. He's just looking out at the universe and remembering that our senses and our wetware, our grey matter and our fragile nerves, are limited and might not perceive all that is out there accurately, and as we evolve as a species and as individuals, our abilities to apprehend what the universe really has to offer are bound to change along with the length of our pinky toes and earlobes and our ability to digest lactose. That he happens also to believe that we have reached a point in our own evolution where we can perhaps guide the process consciously and purposefully now with the help of various practices old and new makes his speculations all that much more interesting, and maybe just a little persuasive. But really, he doesn't care if we believe him or not. He's done what he's done and seen what he's seen and has left us a body of work that shows him for a brave and humane and interesting man, full of the best kind of humor and kindness and love even for people he thinks are occluded fools.

So of course I had to spend part of this year with him. Hail Eris.

*I'm more or less in that camp, but can definitely see "something" happening next winter, if only because such a sizeable portion of our population seems to think something will. The ground is well-prepared to for a nice crop of self-fulfilling prophecies to sprout. One thing I learned from this book is that people were pointing to 2012 as a time when "everything" would change long before the current mania for the Mayan calendar arose. No less interesting and persuasively rational a cat than Terrence McKenna pointed to 2012 in his work as far back as 1976. That's a long time for a subculture to dream, and if nothing else confirmation bias will make of whatever does happen in December of next year into something special, even if it just turns out to be a bad snowstorm somewhere that doesn't see a lot of snow.

**If you only read one James Hillman book in your life, go have a look at his collaboration with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse. If you only read two, then please also make time for The Dream And The Underworld. You'll be glad you did if you're at all interested in people, the mind, mythology or the way your own self talks to itself when it thinks you aren't listening. He's brilliant.